With the success and widespread prevalence of the use of credit and debit cards for banking transactions, card issuers, such as banks and financial institutions, have turned to wireless smart devices as a means to provide their customers with a richer, more powerful set of features than is possible using a traditional magnetic stripe (“magstripe”) credit card.
As used herein, the term “smart device” refers to a device with processing capabilities. A smart device may have on-board memory or other storage capacity, may be written to as well as read from, and may contain one or more applications that perform a particular function. Some smart devices may contain an operating system and/or user interface.
As used herein, the term “wireless smart device” refers to a smart device that can communicate via an electric and/or magnetic field between the device and some other entity, usually a wireless terminal or reader. One type of wireless communications that can be used between a wireless smart device and reader is near field communication (NFC). In one form of near field communication, a wireless smart device may communicate with a reader via inductive coupling of the reader antenna to the device antenna. The two loop antennas effectively form a transformer. The reader amplitude-modulates the RF field to send information to the device. The device communicates with the reader by modulating the loading on the device antenna, which also modulates the load on the reader antenna.
As used herein, the term “payment application” refers to an application that performs a payment or other financial transaction. An example payment application might respond to a request for credit card account information, for example, by providing credit card information, such as the credit card number, the name of the card holder, and the expiration date of the card—i.e., information that is typically coded onto the magnetic stripe of traditional credit cards.
Unlike magstripe cards, which are read-only devices that simply report account information to the magstripe card reader, wireless smart devices containing payment applications may have processing capability with which to perform functions, such as encryption/decryption of data, authentication, authorization, and verification of the user or of the user's transaction, storage and/or validation of the card-holder's identification, and so on. Wireless smart devices may interact with wireless readers to enable transactions involving the payment application. Examples of wireless smart devices containing payment applications include mobile phones, smart phones, key fobs, physical cards, personal digital assistants with interfaces to local card readers, and devices provisioned with a soft card.
As used herein, the term “soft card” refers to a software-implemented identity, security, authentication, membership, loyalty, electronic payment, or other card that is loadable onto a device with wireless communications capabilities.
An example of wireless communications commonly used by wireless smart devices is the ISO 14443 interface. The ISO/IEC 14443 specification (hereinafter referred to as the “14443 Specification”) defines a communication protocol for wireless smart devices operating at 13.56 MHz in close proximity with a reader antenna. Applications are uniquely identified by an application identifier (AID), defined by the ISO/IEC 7816 specification. An AID has two parts: a 5-byte registered application provider ID (RID), which is issued by a 14443 controlling authority, and a proprietary application identifier extension (PIX), which is assigned by the registered application provider as it sees fit and which may be from one to eleven bytes.
Some applications may limit the number of instances of that application that a wireless smart device may contain. For example, the protocol for the MasterCard Worldwide (formerly MasterCard International) MasterCard PayPass® product, which is a contactless device used for banking transactions, defines two AIDs, one for the MasterCard® brand and another for the Maestro® brand, and does not support multiple instances of the same PayPass® application (i.e., with the same AID) within one wireless smart device. Other payment applications that prohibit a wireless smart device from containing more than one application of the same type include American Express® ExpressPaySM and JCB® QUICPay™. Application types other than payment applications, such as identity, security, authentication, membership, loyalty, or other application type, may also similarly prohibit a wireless smart device from containing more than one instance of the same application.
There are advantages to allowing multiple instances of the same application on a wireless smart device. For example, it may be desirable to have multiple payment applications from a single financial institution or brand on a single wireless smart device, to allow the consumer to use a single wireless smart device as both a credit card and a debit card, as both a personal card and a corporate card, as both a card with a high credit limit and a card with a low credit limit, and so on. Another advantage is to allow the user multiple card issuer (such as MasterCard) accounts from different financial institutions. None of these advantages are available to the user of a payment or other type of application that does not support multiple instances of the same application on a single wireless smart device. It will be appreciated that the advantages associated with allowing a wireless smart device to support multiple instances of the same application are not limited to payment applications but extend to other types of applications as well.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a system, method, and computer product for providing multiple instances of the same application on a wireless smart device.